Summary Of Alexander And The Terrible

Alexander and the Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Day is focused on a child in elementary school who is at a preadolescent age. This book is geared toward children ages 7 to 11, because at this time children are demonstrating logical and concrete reasoning according to Piaget Stages of Development. Piaget calls this stage of development the Concrete Operational Stage; this is when a child’s thinking becomes less focused on themselves and they are more aware of the world around them. “They begin to realize that one's own thoughts and feelings are unique and may not be shared by others or may not even be part of reality.” (Berk, 2016 ,pg 430). Alexander’s thoughts are more logical and organized because he realizes that he is the one having the bad day and not the people around him. Even though Piaget’s developmental stages can be applied to this children’s book, I feel this book is more …show more content…
It’s mostly described as an over-generalization about the characteristics of an entire group based on gender; such as girls only liking the color pink and boys only liking the color blue. Because this book was written in 1972 I do believe there is presence of gender stereotyping in the book. For example, with the mother and father. The mother looks like a typical house wife who stays home with the children, cooks dinner for the family and sends the kids off to school while the husband works. The mother also is the one to take the children to the dentist and shoe shopping with the father nowhere in sight. Also the teacher is a female and the dentist is a male. In my opinion the male and female roles are not equally represented because since this is an older book they were gender bias to the roles men and women played 45 years ago vs now; in today’s society its very common to have a male teacher or a female dentist. Based on the time that this book was written I do believe that you can see the gender stereotyping that is happening in this